Ramp AI Index: Anthropic leads OpenAI 43.8% to 40.6% as AI prices fall faster than spending grows

Ramp's AI Index is one of the few public datasets that shows what companies actually pay for AI, because it is built from corporate card and bill-pay transactions, not surveys. Its September 2026 reading has overall adoption at 55.9% of businesses on the platform, up 0.6 points from August and 12.1 points from a year earlier. The more interesting numbers sit underneath.

This matters now because Anthropic is heading toward an IPO and OpenAI is raising money at a trillion-dollar scale, so the question of whether business demand is still compounding is a live one. Ramp is a vendor of spend management software and sees only its own customers, so it is a strong sample, not a census.

Who is ahead, and by how much

Anthropic is paid by 43.8% of Ramp businesses, up 0.2 points from August. OpenAI is at 40.6%, up 1.1 points, which narrows what had been a wider lead. Ramp's lead economist Ara Kharazian wrote in the October 14 installment of his "Cracks in the AI Thesis" series that xAI also gained 0.6 points on the back of Grok, while Mistral AI sits under 1% of US firms.

A three-point gap is small enough that one large enterprise rollout could flip it. We would not call a winner on a single month.

Spending is flatter than adoption

Adoption rising does not mean spending is rising at the same pace. In the same October report Ramp says token spending showed virtually no growth in August and September. The top 1% of firms spent $9,568 per employee per month in September, down 3.1% from a July high of $9,873. Median firms that pay for AI spend about $15.70 per employee per month, according to Ramp's live index.

TechCrunch's November 6 write-up gives the longer arc: token spend grew 1.5% across August and September after a 42% jump from June to July, then re-accelerated by 8.9% between September 23 and October 23. Ramp's index page for the week ending October 23 shows the same 8.9% rise in spend alongside a 37.1% rise in token volume.

Volume up 37.1% while spend is up 8.9% is a price story. Ramp puts the blended OpenAI and Anthropic price at $0.56 per million tokens, down 26.8% from the comparable week a month earlier.

The price cuts are in the filings

TechCrunch reports that OpenAI cut API prices in half for GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna in September, and that Anthropic cut prices for Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5. According to the TechCrunch account of a recent Anthropic filing, those cuts reduced revenue growth by about $600 million. For context on that company's trajectory, see our coverage of Anthropic's amended S-1 and slowing growth.

Kharazian's own reading, in the October report, is that falling spend is largely the result of frontier price cuts and efficiency gains lowering the blended price per million tokens. He also reports that customers hold the stronger negotiating position and labs are offering discounts, which could lower prices without raising volume.

Concentration is the quiet risk

Ramp says about 80% of OpenAI and Anthropic spend comes from 1% of firms. TechCrunch quotes Kharazian saying "Almost the entire spend on AI is from venture-backed, high-growth tech companies." A revenue base that leans on a thin slice of customers is more sensitive to a few budgets being cut. Ramp's author suggests the new-customer market may be near saturation, so growth would need to come from deeper use.

Token share moved too. In the week ending October 23, Ramp has Anthropic at 60.5% of token spending, up from 51.3%, and OpenAI at 35.1%, down from 44.2%. That is the opposite direction to the adoption trend, where OpenAI is gaining. Both can be true: OpenAI is winning more firms while Anthropic wins more dollars from the heavy users.

What the data cannot tell us

Ramp covers businesses that use its cards. It does not capture large enterprises that sign annual contracts invoiced outside card rails, which is where much frontier-lab revenue sits. The index is therefore best at direction and mix, weaker at absolute size. The lab valuations we track in our frontier lab valuations tracker rest on contracts this dataset only partly sees.

Valuations sit on top of this data

The Ramp readings arrive as both labs are being repriced. TechCrunch reports that Bloomberg put Anthropic's potential IPO valuation at $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion, down from about $2 trillion in early October, and that OpenAI lowered its proposed valuation to $1.25 trillion from $1.4 trillion and cut its fundraising goal by about $10 billion. Those are reported figures, not company statements.

One more Ramp number deserves attention. Ramp's index shows AI as 5.77% of business spend excluding payroll in September, down from 5.96% in August, even as the share of firms paying rose. Median spend per employee among paying firms rose to $15.70 from $14.74, so the typical firm is spending slightly more while the share of the overall budget slips. Different measures, same message: broader and shallower is the pattern to watch.

Our take

The cleanest reading is that AI is becoming cheaper to buy faster than it is becoming more widely bought. That is good for customers, awkward for lab revenue growth and a reason to be skeptical of any valuation that assumes volume growth outruns price declines indefinitely. Watch the October and November Ramp readings for whether the 8.9% spend rebound holds once the price cuts are fully in the base.